The reign of Alexander I (1801–1825)
began in a spirit of liberalism. Constitutional
government and the abolition of serfdom
were much discussed; though it was made
clear that the autocracy was to be
preserved.

By 1805, the moment at which Tolstoy’s
novel begins, the French were overrunning
Europe and Alexander was leading his
armies against Napoleon. Russia’s defeat at
Friedland, however, led to the striking of a
bargain with Napoleon in 1807 reminiscent
of Stalin’s with Hitler in 1939. And in 1812
Napoleon invaded Russia. His armies
marched to Moscow and back, Alexander
entered Paris in triumph, Napoleon
abdicated, and a generation of young
Russian officers returned to the fatherland
determined to give their own serfs the
freedoms enjoyed by the French peasantry.
Numerous not very secret societies made
plans for revolution of one sort or another.
Then in 1825 Alexander’s death, the
abdication of Constantine, and the
subsequent accession to the throne of Nicholas I, provided the opportunity for
which these revolutionary groups had been
waiting. On 14 December 1825 the
disastrous uprising took place; it was
instantly and violently suppressed. Five
young idealists were hanged, 121 sent to
the mines in Siberia, and the repressive reign
of Nicholas began as it meant to go on. It
would last for thirty years.

Three years after the failed uprising of
the Decembrists, as those young
revolutionaries came to be known, Leo
Nikolaevich Tolstoy was born at Yasnaya
Polyana, his parents’ country estate in the
province of Tula, some 200 miles from
Moscow. They were wealthy landowners,
members of the nobility. His mother died
when he was two years old and his father,
Count Nikolay Tolstoy, seven years later. The
young Tolstoy studied oriental languages
and law at Kazan University, though he left
without graduating. At twenty-three he
joined the army, to fight in the Caucasus and
later at Sevastopol. In the army he began to
write. Childhood was published in 1852, Boyhood in 1854, Sevastopol Sketches in
1855. He continued to write, but remained
in the army until the following year. After
the fall of Sevastopol this talented young
officer returned to enjoy the literary and
social life of Petersburg. In 1856 he left the
army, travelled in Europe for a while, then
settled down on his estate, now equally
concerned with education and social reform;
in 1861 he was involved in negotiating land
settlements after the emancipation of the
serfs.

In 1862 he married Sophia Behrs and in
1863, peacefully settled in what he himself
describes as the ideal conditions of Yasnaya
Polyana, he started to write War and Peace.
For five years he wrote, re-wrote, crossed
out and wrote again, while his wife copied
and re-copied the manuscript with its
numerous alterations and additions. During
those years the book was published in
instalments, the first of them under the title
1805, to a readership growing progressively
more puzzled. If they had expected—as they
might well have done after reading the first
chapters—an absorbing family chronicle,
they were not disappointed. But it was so
much more. Only when the work was
published in its entirety, in 1869, was it
possible to abandon preconceptions
concerning genre and appreciate the integrity of Tolstoy’s masterpiece. Possible,
but not easy. The thing defied definition.
Written half a century after the historical
events it illuminated, the first words of what
is arguably the greatest novel in the Russian
language attack the atrocities of Napoleon
the Antichrist—in French—the language
habitually used by the Russian nobility in
1805. The last words tell us that we must
ignore the evidence of our senses and
acknowledge a dependence we don’t feel.
From first to last such oppositions, like a
side-wind against a sail, power the book.

Tolstoy appears to have perceived life as
a struggle between opposite extremes.
Intellect against instinct. Will against feeling.
‘Rules for subordinating the feeling of love
to the will’, he wrote in his diary, with
touching optimism. ‘First rule. Keep away
from women.’ He was nineteen. Three years
later he was still struggling. ‘In the morning
write my story, read, play the piano or write
about music; in the evening—rules or the
gypsies.’ His faith in rules was to remain
undamaged, a lifelong obsession.

Another entry in his diary, en route for
Sevastopol in 1854, reveals his growing
awareness of the unbridgeable distance
between the accounts of military historians
and the reality of his experience. ‘The
Cossacks want to plunder but not to fight; Hussars and Uhlans suppose military worth
to consist of drunkenness and debauchery,
and the infantry—of robbery and making
money.’ If ‘generals like Gorchakov, who
have lost their sense of feeling and energy’
were not in control, who was?

No one, seems to have been the answer.
Tolstoy was beginning to see the terrifying
dependence of things. Each human thought,
each action at the apex of a triangle whose
sides diverged infinitely to accommodate an
ever-increasing number of causes, whose
base was unreachable; each great leader,
planning and commanding away at the top,
the furthest possible point from that elusive
base, least free because dependent on the
greatest number of causes.

What then was moving those great
masses of humanity from west to east and
from east to west in the early 19th century?
Tolstoy manages to restrain himself from
telling us for two whole books. He lies low at
first and shows us what was not moving
them. The leaders. The officers. The men.
Then the temptation becomes too great. He
breaks cover, with increasing frequency, in
the last two books, and finally comes out
into the open. The first four chapters of
Book Three, Part I, much of the first epilogue
and all of the second are devoted to
hammering home his historical theory.

An event has an infinite and therefore
an unknowable number of causes. Their sum
constitutes the power which moves the
masses. Understanding the laws governing
this power should be the aim of the
historian. Such an understanding would
show us that our free-will is an illusion. Man
has two lives; the personal and the ‘swarm’
life. In the former he manages to preserve
this illusion of free-will. In the latter he
prefers to see heroes, leaders, ‘great men’,
as being responsible for the movement of
the swarm. They are in fact ‘labels giving
names to events, and like labels they have
but the smallest connection with the event
itself’.

To Tolstoy, surely a founder-member of
Shaw’s ‘moral gymnasium’, his theory must
have presented terrible problems. Free-will
denied him his human sensuality. That was
its job. Lack of it let him off the hook. It may
well have seemed the more restful
alternative. But not for long. His belief in
personal regeneration was too strong.
Tolstoy’s answer was yet another opposition.
A parallel hierarchy of feeling, experience,
instinct, with the Kutuzovs of this world at
its apex and the Russian ‘people’ as the
supplier of the unaccountable arbitrary
causes. To those unknowable facts which
deprived him of free-will he opposed Holy Russia. Rousseau had merely confirmed
what Russian intellectuals had long
suspected; there really was a ‘noble savage’
and they had got him.

Truth will only yield to a reason in
possession of all the facts. These are
unobtainable. Very well, it must be made to
yield to something else. Tolstoy had moved
the goal-posts; the vital insights are those
based not on facts but on the passive,
enduring wisdom of the masses.

His theory of history, then, reflected his
own deeply divided self. His natural genius
lay in his ability to reveal the uniqueness, the
multiplicity of things; his longing was for
wholeness, unity. ‘The fox knows many
things’, Archillocus says in his fable, ‘the
hedgehog knows one big thing.’ Isaiah
Berlin saw the emotional cause of Tolstoy’s
view as ‘a passionate desire for a monistic
vision of life on the part of a fox bitterly
intent upon seeing in the manner of a
hedgehog.’

Whatever its divided nature, its
ambivalences, its inconsistencies, the theory
underpins the fiction and the fiction obliges
us to consider the theory. We have the work
of genius based on it. Useless to discuss the
book we might have had without it. To leave
it out of our calculations is to distort the
book we have, to limit our perception of it.
An approach reminiscent of the theatre-goer who asked ‘But apart from that, Mrs Lincoln,
did you enjoy the play?’ War and Peace is
inconceivable—and was not conceived—‘apart from that’.

Tolstoy’s instinctive counterpoint to his
own reasoning, his undeclared theory of a
higher truth, accessible only to ‘the people’,
and to those who have not lost their sense
of it, is in evidence throughout the book. It
is the powerful opposition to his own bleak
view of the helpless swarm, driven across a
continent and back, killing and plundering,
by a force which is merely the sum of their
own arbitrary actions.

Tolstoy himself, in an uncharacteristic
moment of modesty, seems to have
underestimated his genius. Should he set his
theory out in a properly rational epilogue, or
leave the poetry of his fiction to carry the
message? Rules or the gypsies? He havers.
Four chapters of rules, twelve chapters of
fiction and finally, in the second epilogue,
twelve solid chapters of rules. One can only
sympathise with the man. It is hard enough
to stop reading the book. To stop writing it
was to accept defeat. On one front at least.
To accept the unknowability of all the causes
towards which, in his search for unity, his
reasoning had led him. Pity. Just for a
moment there we thought he might be
going to discover them for us. All of them.

Summary

Book I

Before Tolstoy reveals his theories he
convinces us by stealth; he shows us them
in action. In a series of short chapters
containing one dominant idea, a method
he adopts throughout the book, we meet
four families in the Russia of 1805. We get
to know them slowly but they stay with us
for life. Pierre Bezukhov, at a reception in
Petersburg, at the deathbed of his father;
the Rostovs in Moscow; Count Bolkonsky
and his daughter on their country estate,
Mlle Bourienne, her companion, and
Andrei, her brother; the Kuragins in
Petersburg.

A multitude of characters, each with
their own private concerns, all adding to
that infinite, unknowable number of causes
which, in Tolstoy’s view, drive history.

Book 2

Kutuzov is at his headquarters in
Braunau in Austria, where Andrei is his
adjutant. Cadet Nikolai Rostov is sharing
quarters with Vaska Denisov, his squadron
commander. Kutuzov retreats across the
Enns and Denisov’s squadron returns under
fire to burn the bridge. Tolstoy maintains
the balance between war and peace and we live through historical events as they are
experienced by his fictional characters.

Book 3

Prince Vasili marries Hélène to a
resistant but defenceless Pierre. His attempt
on the Bolkonsky fortune for Anatole is less
successful. If Petersburg represents the
intellect in Russia, Moscow must surely hold
the heart of it; the Rostovs rejoice to receive
a letter from Nikolai. Nikolai meets Andrei.
Napoleon triumphs at Austerlitz, where
Nikolai and the Emperor Alexander find
themselves equally vulnerable.

Book 4

Nikolai returns with Denisov to a
Moscow shocked by defeat but proud of its
heroes. Kutuzov has fallen from favour;
Count Rostov organises a dinner in honour
of Bagration. Pierre, gloomily aware of his
wife’s infidelity, is challenged to a duel by
Dolokhov and separates from Hélène.
Tragedy involves both Andrei and his wife.
Denisov and Dolokhov fall in love and
Nikolai gambles.

Book 5

Pierre joins the Freemasons. He travels to his estate in Kiev, determined to free his
serfs, and accompanies Andrei to Bald Hills;
there the old prince directs recruitment and
Marya tends Andrei’s son. Hélène returns to
Petersburg, where she patronises the
ambitious Boris Drubetskoi.

Nikolai rejoins his regiment. Denisov
commandeers transport to feed his men;
facing trial and wounded he retreats to
hospital. Both Nikolai and Boris are present
as peace is concluded at Tilsit.

Book 6

Andrei, visiting Count Rostov at
Otradnoe, his country estate, meets
Natasha. He returns to Petersburg with
renewed energy and throws himself into
affairs of state. Natasha, in Petersburg,
attends her first ball, at which she dances
with Andrei. He proposes and is accepted.
However, the old prince insists that their
marriage be postponed for a year. Andrei
leaves, but asks Marya’s help in persuading
their father to relent.

Book 7

Tolstoy defines army life as a blissful
state of irreproachable idleness. Count
Rostov’s affairs are in disarray and Nikolai
agrees, reluctantly, to take leave. His
intervention scarcely improves matters. There follows a beautiful account of the
Russian soul expressed in Russian country
traditions. In painful contrast, the Countess
decides that Nikolai must marry a wealthy
heiress. He refuses. The arrival of mummers
provides a distraction, brings Nikolai closer
to Sonya but into conflict with his mother.

Book 8

Pierre, disenchanted with Freemasonry,
returns to Moscow. There a senile Prince
Bolkonsky torments his daughter and Boris
hesitates between two wealthy women.
Count Rostov and Natasha call on the old
prince, who offends Natasha. Hélène
introduces Natasha to her brother Anatole,
who pursues her, seemingly replacing the
absent Andrei. She breaks her engagement
and agrees to elope, but the elopement is
forestalled, and a despairing Natasha
attempts to poison herself. In comforting
her Pierre reveals his love.